


Joke's On You

by cryptonomicon



Series: Gifts & Miscellaneous Drabbles [2]
Category: James Bond (Craig movies), James Bond (Movies)
Genre: 00Q - Freeform, M/M, birthday gift, gratuitous fluff, mentions of previous films/characters, please god forgive me for I hath fluffed, post Skyfall
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-05
Updated: 2013-02-05
Packaged: 2017-11-28 07:04:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,323
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/671637
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cryptonomicon/pseuds/cryptonomicon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bond underestimates Q's capacity for certain things, including humor and personal security. He learns quickly that he need underestimate neither of those particular things.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Joke's On You

**Author's Note:**

  * For [koppywriting](https://archiveofourown.org/users/koppywriting/gifts).



He had never been in the habit of laughing at Q’s jokes. Sometimes, when he was tucked into an off-center dive in Hong Kong or resting at a café in Belize, he wished that he would. The issue, he often found upon returning to his senses, was that Q’s jokes were only very rarely funny.

Q was a master of irony in his own right, but Bond had grown sick of irony so far hither-and-yon that it was hardly even something to consider. Irony had gotten the last woman he loved killed. Irony had killed Mathis. Irony had gotten him killed. He did not like to think that Q was next.

So when Q began to call his home office “Q Branch” as well, Bond was less than open to the humor. He was still too haunted by the fact that someone, sometime, would understand the reference and get a wicked idea in their heads. Wicked ideas like invading the poor whelp in his own home when he was at his most vulnerable.

To say that Bond may have begun to spend more time at Q’s apartment after that was an understatement. He actually overstayed his welcome so many times that Q hid the key on him once. Hell, he may have eaten in for all Bond knew, but when he responded in a less than sane and stellar fashion to the idea of not being able to get in (I.E. kicking the door in), he realized that some sense of humor was going to be required if he was going to survive his smitten wibblies for the wretched programmer.

Bond had used those precise words when apologizing to Q, and that had earned him not only forgiveness, but his favorite kind of Q laughter (not, of course that he had catalogued them in any way).

One thing he did not anticipate as being an aspect in surviving his smitten wibblies was the inevitable doom of Q catching a bloody cold. When Bond came into the actual Q Branch, and not the one that insinuated much more fun activities, and found Q very noticeably absent, he had nearly shocked himself into a stupor.

Mallory and Tanner had both laughed at him.

In response, he left before they could debrief him on his next assignment, instead bent on procuring the best chicken soup in London and tending to whatever pathetic state Q had gotten himself into.

It took him four hours, and a grudging call to Tanner for assistance, to find the best chicken soup in London, let alone purchase any. By the time he reached Q’s apartment it was well beyond dusk, and Bond was about ready to eat the soup himself were he no halfway devoted to the idea of spoon-feeding it to the typically self-sufficient Quartermaster.

When he found Q’s door slightly ajar, however, the soup seemed a much less vital aspect of the scene he was about to enter.

His heart beat steadily faster as he set his package down in the hall and slowly drew his gun out of the holster that perpetually rested under his arm. He knew for a fact that Q’s door, and lock thereupon, were not only bullet proof but unbreakable. Bond had not only been the one to replace the door, but he had also put in the special order to MI6 for its construction. For it to be hanging ajar, unless very purposefully, was an impossibility.

He toed the door open carefully, peering as far as he could around the door before slinking in entirely. There was a dim light on in the kitchen, Bond guessed spill-over light from Q’s bedroom. He moved towards it on noiseless feet, his back pressed up against the wall just beside the doorway.

“Bond, I can hear you breathing,” Q intoned nasally from the next room, and Bond craned his neck around the doorway.

There on the floor was a man, easily three times the size of Q, lying flat on his face with no apparent intention of getting up. Q stood next to the kettle on the counter, his nose red and his eyes watery. Somehow, Bond was more relieved by the fact that he didn’t look as sick as the rest of Q Branch had implied than he was relieved by the fact he wasn’t dead. Q wasn’t on the list of people Bond anticipated to die.

He supposed M hadn’t been either, but that was a separate matter.

“You just left the door open for the security team, didn’t you?” Bond asked, straightening and holstering his gun. Q nodded, but seemed to regret he motion as he screwed his eyes shut and held his temples as if to keep the lobes of his brain together.

Quickly darting back out the foyer and into the hallway, Bond recovered the soup he had left before Q even had the chance to open his eyes again. He stepped over the prone man’s legs and set the parcel on the kitchen island. He slipped the plastic bag away from it and opened the cardboard take-away bucket that the soup had been stewing in.

Bond knew that Q was sick when he failed to comment about the heavenly smell, which even to his own ambivalence was quite impressive. But from the looks of it Q seemed to guess its contents and scuffled his way over to where Bond stood vigilantly over the procured soup.

“You’re a saint, James,” Q groaned as he all but stuck his face in it in an attempt to properly smell it. He only laughed, tucking the younger man under his chin when he surfaced for air.

“Ah, Bond, you’re already here.”

James turned to see Mallory peering in the front door. Their director strode in, cast one glance at the man on the floor, and then turned his attention to the two of them. “You’ve got the situation handled, I see.”

He shook his head. “No, Q had it already handled when I got here,” he stated.

Mallory smirked in response. “I was talking about the soup,” the older man said, before turning back to the man on the floor, who was actually starting to stir by the looks of his twitching fingers. “The team will be in shortly to drag him out. I suggest you take him back to bed, Bond. We need him healthy as soon as possible.”

“Go away, Mallory, or I’ll sneeze on you,” Q threatened from where he was tucked against James’ collar.

Their handler wisely skittered out the door. If a man like Mallory was capable of a thing like skittering.

Placing the lid back on the soup and tucking it into the crook of his elbow, he steered the two of them back towards Q’s bedroom, where the bedside lamps were indeed on. Upon entering the vicinity of the mattress Q detached himself and crawled beneath the duvet, proceeding thereupon to cease moving entirely.

Bond set the soup on the nightstand closest to the reluctant Quartermaster and sat on the edge of the bed, rubbing what he hoped to be the Q’s back through the coverings.

“I suppose the joke is on me now,” he commented, earning himself only a mildly disgruntled hum and the beginnings of what looked to be a head poking out next to the pillows. “You calling this Q Branch. I didn’t think you were serious.”

The only thing he could decipher from the response mumbling was, “Explain.”

He smiled. “I didn’t think there was any place on this planet more secure than Q Branch. I was wrong in a way, but also right I suppose.” He poked at the mutinous fuzz peeking out from beneath the duvet. “This place has to be secure if it has enough in it to protect you when you’re like this.”

“I’ll sneeze on you too,” Q growled a little more coherently, and James only laughed.


End file.
